The present invention relates generally to the field of communication devices. In particular, the present invention relates to a portable communication device having a dynamically updated banner.
In portable communication devices such as, for example, cellular telephones, it is typical to display a message in the form of text on the display screen of the telephone. This text message is commonly known as a banner and is displayed by default in the standby mode during operation of the telephone. Although a banner is static in nature, it is capable of being manually edited by the user of the telephone at any time. The manual editing of the banner is typically accomplished by way of accessing a menu item from a list of menu items.
The act of accessing the menu item to edit the banner can become quite time consuming and burdensome to the user since it typically involves manually searching through a long list of menu items. Since banners are static and are not capable of being edited with ease, they usually only contain generic information which requires little or no editing by the user in the future. For this reason, banners have been used (often for the entire lifetime of the telephone), for example, merely to display the user""s name. Having the user""s name (or any message for that matter) continuously displayed as the banner, i.e. regardless of the date, tends to result in an inefficient use of the display screen during the standby mode. It is therefore desirable to provide a banner that not only displays meaningful information, but a banner that changes on a dynamic basis to thereby convey significant information relevant to the current date.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a banner that displays updated and meaningful information on a dynamic basis.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a banner that changes on a dynamic basis to thereby convey significant information relevant to the current date.
These and other objects and advantages of the invention will become more fully apparent from the description and claims which follow or may be learned by the practice of the invention.
The present invention is directed to a system and method for dynamically displaying a message corresponding to the current date on a display screen of a communication device during standby mode of operation of the communication device. The system includes a calendar having a plurality of dates. Each of the plurality of dates has a unique message associated therewith. The system also includes software that compares the current date with the plurality of dates from the calendar. The software then determines whether the current date matches one of the plurality of dates from the calendar. The display screen of the communication device displays the unique message if the current date matches one of the plurality of dates from the calendar. If the current date does not match one of the plurality of dates from the calendar, the display screen of the communication device displays a default message. The calendar may be capable of being edited by a user of the communication device such that additional unique messages may be assigned to any date from the calendar. Alternatively, a communication service provider for the communication device may pre-determine the unique message to be displayed for each of the plurality of dates.